Federico Garcia Lorca: Two poems

translated by Gilbert Wesley Purdy

Federico Garcia Lorca is notorious for having rewritten poems without the least concern for indicating which (if any) he considered to be his final draft. He was equally inattentive to the proofs of his books and often allowed the worst kinds of mistakes to go uncorrected. Added to these facts, the standard text of his “Casida of the Branches”, as established by the Madrid Obras Completas, provides no provenance for the poem. It is unclear, that is to say, that Lorca ever achieved a final draft, as he returned yet again, during the final days of his life, to rewriting the poems of The Divan of the Tamarit.

These facts have encouraged me to take a liberty with my translation of the text. I have changed the tense of the fourth stanza from the past imperfect to the present tense. This for two reasons I feel are compelling:

1 Lorca clearly avoids the past tense whenever possible in order to maintain an immediacy in his poems.
2 The stanza makes much better sense in the present tense, the approach of autumn being immanent rather than having already passed. The sense of the poem is consistent, given the change, the orchard being under an impending threat of decay throughout.

The alternative might be that the poet simply wrote a questionable stanza (this, of course, happens) that is inconsistent with his style as we know it.

Gacela of Unforseen Love

No one understood the perfume
of the dark magnolia of your belly.
No one knew you martyred
a hummingbird of love between those teeth.

A thousand Persian carousels slept
in the moon plaza of your forehead,
while four nights I lashed myself
to your waist, enemy of snow.

Among the plaster and jasmine, you saw
I was a pallid branch of seeds.
I sought through my breast
to give you letters of ivory saying always,

Gilbert Wesley Purdy’s work in poetry, prose and translation has appeared in many journals, paper and electronic, including: Jacket magazine (Australia); Poetry International (San Diego State University); The Georgia Review (University of Georgia); Grand Street; The Pedestal Magazine; SLANT (University of Central Arkansas); Orbis (UK); Eclectica; and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. More detailed information is available at his Hyperlinked Online Bibliography.